Post by David Pierce. Find me on Twitter.

I do a lot of writing sitting in front of my computer. I write here, I write elsewhere, I even keep a personal journal that’s Web-based. Which is all well and good (especially since I bought the Apple Slim Keyboard – best $50 ever. But I digress).

The trouble with doing all my writing on the computer is that all my distractions – Facebook, StumbleUpon, and various other fun time-drains – are close at hand. They’re calling me away, trying to get me to stop writing and start looking to see if there are any new embarrassing pictures of my friends on Facebook.

I’m also hopelessly distracted by pop-ups telling me I have new emails and IMs, and flashing browser tabs telling me there’s something new and awesome that I absolutely have to see, right this very second.

For all those reasons and more, I’m grateful to have found Writer, a distraction-free way to write on the Web, and block out all the other things vying for my attention.

Writer is a simple application, intentionally: There’s nothing to get hung up on, nothing to get confused about and get distracted trying to understand. Just start writing. There are two keyboard shortcuts – Control+N to start a new document, and Control+S to save the current document. That’s it. Writer does automatically save your work every few minutes, but the manual save comes in handy for the anal-retentive writers like myself.

If you’re in dire need of some formatting, Writer’s got your back. You can choose among a few preset text colors and fonts (or enter in any HTML color), as well as change the line spacing to 1.5 or double-space. That’s it. If you like to overly-format to avoid actually doing any writing, Writer’s going to foil your best-laid plans.

Writer will track your word count as you write, and lets you deal with as many documents at once as you’d like to. When you’re finished with a document, you can download it as a .txt file or a PDF, or print or email the document directly.

If you create an account, you can save your documents with Writer and have them always accessible. I never found it necessary to save a document for more than one session with Writer, but it’s a nice option to offer.

On a PC, try loading Writer and then typing F11 – you’ll maximize the window, cover everything else, and have only a dark screen waiting to be filled with your brilliant thoughts, inner musings, or hilarious stories of weekend debauchery.

There are applications that do this on both Mac OS X (Writeroom) and Windows (Darkroom), but Writer is the way to go if you’re a Web-writer. It’s free, easy to use, requires no download, and is available anywhere there’s Internet. And if there’s no Internet, you probably shouldn’t be there anyway.

How do you shut out distractions and get writing done?

Photo: StarbuckGuy